John Delcos enters his third season covering the Mets for The Journal News after eight seasons on the Yankees beat. Prior to coming to New York, John covered the Baltimore Orioles, Cleveland Browns and Cleveland Indians.

13 Comments

In something a little bit different, did anyone see the story saying income tax returns released by mlb show Bud Selig earned $14,515,071 in the 12 months ending October 2006. How did they decide on that amount? Any of those lucky numbers in contract that Astro Whacko Charley Kerfield used to have?

But baseball has the highest revenue off all sports and according to an article in a recent “Sports Business Journal” pays a lower percentage of revenue for player salaries than NFL, NBA or NHL. That is what the 30 owners look for!

Not all 30 owners Dan. I think owners in Boston and the Bronx have shown that if you pay them more you will bring in more…. Time will tell if the Wilpons are having a permanent revelation or a temporary one. Do you think the NFL or NBA would allow a franchise to have virtually all close to minimum salaries like the Marlins have….? No way…...
I’m glad we got Sanatna but for baseball is it really good that a team with an owner as rich as any, and with the taxpayers of their state building him a new park, he dumped the best pitcher in the game over salary he could easily afford to pay??

You can only pay players alot if you have the sources of revenue. Twins don’t have local TV networks like Mets/Sox/Yanks.

Twins could have paid Santana but they would not make as much $$ as they wanted to or maybe not make much at all. I can’t blame somebody for wanting to maximize their investment. The Twins owner might be as rich as any other, but why should he not make as much profit as the others? You’d want to make $$ too if you owned a team, even if you could afford not to.

As long as there are local networks in BB, there will be differences in salary levels for each team. Fortunately for Met fans, the team is in a big market which means a big revenue from TV.

scoop: They’repaying Selig 14 mil for this drivel.. Not you…. This small market stuff is crap. If it weren’t crap it would be a problem in the NFL and NBA also… They figured it out. Baseball could care less…..... The bridges are collapsing and the taxpayer is building the Twins a park….. In return the super rich owner gives the people of Minnesota the finger…..

You can’t compare BB to NFL. The NFL TV contracts are huge compared to BB b/c the NFL is much more popular than BB. And the NFL only plays once a week. So the revenue is going to be shared and thus you can have caps on salary and all that stuff. You have local TV for BB b/c BB plays every day. Why should the Mets share all that $$ w/other teams? If I’m Wilpon, I’d say forget it too!

As far as Minn and their stadium and such, I’d be upset too that they did not keep santana if I was a twin fan. But I would not be upset that as a taxpayer they used my money to build a stadium. It creates business for the city.

NBA? who cares. The sport hasn’t meant anything since Bird and Magic and Jordan.

read dan Gurney …. Baseball has the highest revenue… your lines are all out of the big spender books… But its bad for the game…. All the sports could have built a horrible system or a good system. Football system ius great, basketball is great… Baseball sucks… Having a Green Bay thrive is good for football, watching a Marlins game in front of 5000 people makes baseball a joke…. NBA who cares… Lots of people care, just because you don’t doesn’t make it go away and be meaningless. I don’t watch hockey but to say who cares is cheap….

You know the stadium thing works for a couple years and guess what, when you don’t field a competitivie team they stop coming… It only provides revenue if the team does its thing…..

... But baseball has the highest revenue off all sports and according to an article in a recent â€œSports Business Journalâ€ pays a lower percentage of revenue for player salaries than NFL, NBA or NHL

I believe the NFL still produces more revenue than MLB, though baseball is catching up fast.

A reason why baseball may pay a lower percentage of revenue for player salaries is because of their extensive scouting, development, and farm system costs. I am not that familiar with the structures of the other sports, but I doubt they spend like MLB does on these other areas. So the idea that this money is going into the pockets of the owners is speculative at best.

Agree with scoop that cable revenues and regional sports networks are a big differentiator between the large market teams and teams like the Twins and Brewers. They simply don’t have all the same opportunities to generate revenue that the big market teams do. To some extent, revenue sharing evens the playing field a little, but it’s still uneven.

For this reason, you can understand why the Twins often have to let their stars go. However, if there’s one player they should have made an exception for, it’s Santana. Even if the owner had to dip into his own pocket to help pay for his contract.